25/07/2023
The FAST acronym is an easy way to recognize urgent of a stroke:
FACE: One-sided facial drooping, or a crooked smile.
Arm Weakness: Difficulty holding up an arm.
Speech: Strange-sounding or slurred speech.
Time: Call 912 right away because "time is brain.
However, people sometimes dismiss potential stroke symptom. If patients have an episode of weakness or numbness in a hand or arm that lasts a couple of hours, they may tend to brush it off or ignore a second episode a few weeks later. Take these symptoms serious, particularly if you have predisposing stroke risk factors including older age, diabetes, high blood pressure, pregnancy, oral contraceptive use and smoking. If you have an episode of numbness or difficulty with function that lasts more than a few seconds, certainly that's something that needs to be reviewed with a provider, whether that be your primary care physician and then, in a lot of cases, the emergency department.